Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 15, 1995 TAG: 9509150098
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MIKE FEINSILBER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
For the KGB bodyguard, keeping watch while the leader of the Kremlin slept in a guest room of the ``Western White House,'' it must have been an awkward moment: Marching up to him was a sleepwalking Pat Nixon, arms outstretched, clad only in a nightgown.
Former Kremlin Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin tells the story of the sleepwalking first lady in newly published memoirs, ``In Confidence.'' Moscow's man in Washington for 24 Cold War years - through the terms of five Soviet leaders and the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan presidencies - spills some other undiplomatic beans.
He reports Reagan's reaction when told that the ambassador had been recalled by Moscow and promoted to the Communist Party Central Committee.
``Is he really a communist?'' the ``amazed'' Reagan asked, according to Dobrynin.
And the ambassador says that in the election of 1968, Kremlin leaders were so fearful of victory by the stridently anti-communist Nixon that they directed Dobrynin to offer money to Nixon's Democratic rival, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Dobrynin resisted this intrusion into the politics of another country, but the Kremlin insisted. Dutifully, he said, he made the offer obliquely over breakfast at Humphrey's home.
Humphrey declined; the matter was never again mentioned.
Dobrynin was a Washington institution. He probably ate as many White House meals as many Cabinet officers. He became the friend - even the confidant - of presidents and a back-channel conduit between the two Cold War capitals. He reported that Nixon and aide Henry Kissinger told Dobrynin things they would not even share with the secretary of state, William P. Rogers.
Former British diplomat Nicholas Henderson calls the book ``surely the most revealing account of the 40 years of the Cold War to have come out of Russia.''
Historians will take note of Dobrynin's contention that, ``sadly for the followers of Reagan,'' it was not the strain of matching Reagan's huge arms buildup that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire.
``We did not bankrupt ourselves in the arms race as the Caspar Weinbergers [former defense secretary] would like to believe,'' he wrote. ``The troubles in our economy were the result of our own internal contradictions.''
Spicier is Dobrynin's account of Pat Nixon's sleepwalking at San Clemente, Calif., during Nixon's first term.
``Around 2 a.m.,'' the ambassador wrote, Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev's bodyguard, ``standing watch near his bedroom in the courtyard just across from Nixon's apartment, saw the door of the president's quarters open. His wife Pat appeared in a long nightgown, her hands stretched forward and her eyes fixed in the distance, apparently in some kind of trance.
``She reached our bodyguard and stopped, saying nothing. The guard attempted to turn Mrs. Nixon around, but she refused to move and stood stiffly. After some hesitation, the Soviet guard, an officer of the KGB, took Mrs. Nixon in his arms and carried her back to the room from which she had just emerged; it was her bedroom.
``He put her back in bed, and at just that moment the Secret Service arrived. They waved, smiled and said to our man, `OK, OK, thanks.' They did not seem all that surprised.''
by CNB